The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell

Abstract

Reviewed by: The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell Charles J. Holden The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism. By Gregg Cantrell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 555. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-10097-6.) Gregg Cantrell’s sweeping account makes a strong case for the Texas Populist Party having played a critical role in the foundation of modern American liberalism. Responding to the juggernaut of industrialization, Texas Populists were among the first to recognize the painful truth that modern capitalism had “rendered the classical liberal model obsolete” (p. 13). These “new forms of concentrated power” by the late 1800s posed a grave threat to individual liberty (p. 13). Whereas organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance had formed to counter the reactionary forces of industrial capitalism, it was the genius of the Populists to carry the challenge into the political system. By doing so, they brought political and economic democracy together as part of the same fight. The turn to politics was both principled and pragmatic: Populists called for an activist government as the “only institution that the ‘people’ could control” and as the remaining “countervailing power” that could defend citizens’ liberties against unchecked corporate greed (pp. 147, 15). Cantrell’s impressive research enables him to capture important distinctions among Texas Populist leaders as well as regional differences within the state. The chapters also detail the rough-and-tumble of Texas politics, culminating in the election of 1896, when a combination of fraud, voter intimidation, and fusion managed to blunt Populist momentum. It is hard to imagine another book offering the kind of on-the-ground look at this important political party that Cantrell does. The short lifespan of the Populist Party, Cantrell argues, has left its ideological legacy underappreciated in the scholarship on modern American liberalism. To cite just one critical example, Cantrell contends it was the Populists who “normalized anti-laissez-faire and made it a legitimate position for debate” in American politics (p. 410). The Texas Populists, astute “policy wonks” that they were, pointed to successful government agencies such as the Post Office Department that served citizens’ interests efficiently and fairly while remaining beyond the invisible hand of laissez-faire capitalism (p. 124). [End Page 735] The normalization of anti-laissez-faire politics and the call for an activist state in the name of democracy bore fruit nationally in the Progressive era and were given principles among many in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. While careful not to draw a simple line between the Populist Party and the New Deal, Cantrell notes the personal connections from Texas. A young Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, was a passionate New Dealer, while his grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., was an early member of the Populist Party. In addition, while the reforming drive of the Texas Populists fell short when it came to racial and gender equity, here, too, their legacy survived, Cantrell suggests, since at its core the party “call[ed] into question the very foundations of the social and political order” (p. 259). Women and African American men were active within the party in the 1890s, and the Populists’ central principle of using the government as a “countervailing power” against oppression was at the heart of modern American liberalism through the 1900s (p. 15). Contemporary politics compels Cantrell to delineate his subjects from current discussions of “small-p populism” as a political style (p. 19). The ideological legacy of the Texas Populists is clearly visible in New Deal achievements such as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Social Security Act of 1935. That these laws countered “the captains of big business who could run roughshod over workers and consumers and [who] through their own power [could] corruptly manipulate the government to their own benefit” helps Cantrell draw a clear distinction between the party of the 1890s and the cynical populism of Donald J. Trump and his revanchist base (p. 13). Charles J. Holden St. Mary’s College of Maryland Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association